Bad Turn

by Zoe Sharp

  If Hamzeh contacted Eric Kincaid expecting to find him more willing to negotiate because of my capture, he would be sadly disappointed. I couldn’t even rule out that Kincaid would tell him he’d been conned—might boast of it, even. Which did not bode well for my long-term prospects. Or my short-term ones, come to that.

  If I hadn’t managed to get myself out of here before then, it was game over.

  Outside the door, I heard new voices. Whoever it was, they weren’t happy. I leapt for the sofa, then swore as I darted across to plonk the candle back on its mount above the fireplace.

  I contemplated pulling on the hood again just to take the focus away from my hands, but dismissed the idea. Instead, I lay on my side and buried my face into the cushions, letting my hair flop forwards to cover what remained of my features. Still gripping the corkscrew, I shoved my hands behind my back, out of sight, just as the key rattled in the lock.

  Footsteps entered and paused. A man’s voice said roughly, “Leave us!”

  The door closed again. The footsteps resumed, coming closer. I allowed myself to brace—it was what Helena would have done.

  A hand grasped my shoulder, reached for my chin. His touch was not rough, but it still made me flinch.

  The man said, “Hush. It’s OK, Helena. It’s all OK now.”

  As he lifted me and my hair fell away from my face, I recognised his voice. It took him a second in shock to do the same.

  “But you’re—”

  I thrust off the sofa with my left hand outstretched—not the one with the corkscrew in it. I didn’t need a weapon in order to punch him in the throat hard enough to silence him.

  He staggered back, hands to his neck, mouth working soundlessly. I kept coming, grabbing both lapels of his jacket and using them to jerk his upper body down to meet my rapidly rising knee. The blow landed in the fleshy vee under his ribcage, blasting the air out of his lungs, leaving him winded and gasping. He crumpled.

  I kept hold of his jacket to control the noise of his descent, spread it open once he was on the floor to pat him down. I took the 9mm Beretta out of the shoulder holster under his left arm.

  By the time he’d got his breath back, I’d checked over the gun and wedged it against the underside of his right kneecap, leaving him in no doubt of my intentions.

  “So, Mr Orosco,” I said from between clenched teeth. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve just tried to have your own daughter kidnapped?”

  36

  Darius Orosco started to swear then, spitting out vicious words about what he was going to do to me. I jabbed the gun harder under his patella. All he did was sneer.

  “Go ahead. Soon as you fire that thing they’ll come running. They’ll be all over you before you can leave this room, hey.”

  It grieved me to admit that he was right. I lifted the gun away from his knee and put it down on the sofa beside me. Orosco’s disdain turned smug.

  I rose, grabbed his right foot and lifted it sharply. The move flipped him half onto his side to avoid his knee flexing the wrong way. I braced my boot on his thigh and put about a quarter turn of twist onto his ankle. He went rigid, his knee a twitch away from exploding.

  “How about now?” I asked. “If I break your leg and you squeal like a girl, they’ll just assume it’s me screaming.”

  Pride kept him silent. I notched it up a bit further, hardened the lock and felt the ligaments begin to quiver like high-tension power lines in a storm.

  “Fuck you,” he snarled.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s the best you can come up with?”

  “Fuck you, bitch!”

  I laughed without humour. “Did you know spiral fractures are notoriously difficult to treat?” I piled on enough additional pressure to make him grunt.

  “And so close to a joint…well, all kinds of complications are likely to ensue,” I went on, my tone conversational. “My father was an orthopaedic surgeon, in case you were wondering.”

  I notched it up again and he couldn’t suppress a groan.

  “Factor in the poor blood supply to the lower leg and you may as well just go straight for amputation.”

  The groan became a whimper.

  I held it, letting that sink in for a few moments, then said, “So, are we going to talk like adults, or do I need to really hurt you?”

  “We talk,” Orosco said between his teeth, but he still muttered, “bitch” after it.

  As soon as I relaxed my grip, he lashed out with the foot I’d been holding. I blocked with my forearm and kicked him in the groin.

  It took him longer to recover from that one. He didn’t say much that was intelligible while he was doing so. Eventually, aware this was all taking too long, I hauled him into a sitting position and propped his back against the base of an armchair.

  “Just breathe through it,” I advised. “The pain will start to ease off in a minute or so.”

  He began hyperventilating like someone going into labour, asked sourly, “How the fuck d’you know that, hey?”

  “You think you’re the first bloke I’ve kicked in the balls?”

  He glared at me but didn’t try anything else. His colour began to normalise, his breathing slowed.

  “OK,” I said. “Are you going to tell me why the hell you kidnapped your own daughter?”

  “Simple,” he said, and the sneer was back. “I didn’t trust you to protect her.”

  I eyed him for a moment, let him consider what he’d just said in light of what I’d just done. “But you trusted your bunch of thugs to grab her and bring her to you, alive and unhurt, when they didn’t even know what she looked like?” I said. “You are aware they blew up the bloody helicopter we were in?”

  For the first time, alarm flared in his eyes. “She wasn’t…?”

  I let him sweat a beat before I shook my head. “No, she got out—I got her out—in time. But don’t you think it was overkill having your men shoot up Ugoccione’s private island just so you could ‘rescue’ Helena?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Orosco said. “What makes you think they’re my men?”

  “They grabbed me and brought me here. Now you’ve turned up and I don’t see you with your wrists bound,” I said shortly. “If they’re not working for you, they give a damn good impression of it.”

  “I hear things in my line of business, and I got the capability—and the smarts—to react. Don’t mean I ordered them in the first place.”

  “You knew before we left New Jersey that we were coming here to see Ugoccione, correct?”

  He hesitated, but considering I’d been there when Kincaid told him, he had no choice but to admit, “Yeah. So?”

  “So, you happened to hear—in the line of business, of course—that somebody was planning to hit Ugoccione. And then you trusted this unknown bunch of somebodies to kidnap your own daughter and, out of the goodness of their hearts, to bring her to you?”

  “Easy to make the facts fit your own little theory when you don’t got it in you to see the big picture, hey?”

  “I guess so. Well, please excuse my tiny little brain and tell me why you didn’t at least warn your own son-in-law he was walking into a war zone?”

  “The kid talks good. Maybe I wanted to see if he really could handle himself when the going got a little rocky.”

  “When you knew Helena was with him?” I shook my head, more in disbelief than denial. “And what about Ugoccione himself? From what I understand, you and he go way back. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “Tomas is a switched-on kinda guy,” Orosco dismissed. “He does know how to take care of himself.”

  I thought again of Sean, hit by a fluke shot fired by someone who hadn’t even been aiming. It had changed everything.

  “Bullets don’t care about experience,” I said bitterly. “Not when you walk into the path of one.”

  “Wait, you telling me they shot him? No way! They—”

  His voice chopped off suddenly as his bra
in caught up with his mouth.

  “By ‘they’, I assume you mean the Syrians?” I said mildly.

  The look he threw me was vicious. “Can you blame them, hey? These are some very serious people. You can’t just do business with a guy like Hamzeh one day, refuse to do business the next. Decisions like that have consequences. Kincaid knew damn well when he shut down the supply line Hamzeh wasn’t gonna take something like that lying down.”

  “O–K,” I said slowly.

  He looked taken aback. “‘OK’? That all you’re gonna say?”

  I shrugged. “It makes sense…but there is one more thing I’d love to hear you explain to me.” I paused. “You see, we only just found out from Ugoccione that it was the Syrians who bought those M4s used in the ambush on your daughter. So, how is it that you seem to know all about it?”

  37

  “Hey, it wasn’t me said it was the Syrians—that was all you.”

  Orosco’s hesitation was momentary but there all the same. A fleeting behind-the-scenes mental scramble to review what he might have said—what he might have given away—and repurpose it for his own ends. He tried to hide the blip behind an exaggerated shrug, but it was too late.

  “You didn’t exactly look surprised.”

  “Hey, in this game you always gotta be a half-dozen moves ahead of everybody else, and I’ve been a player a long time.”

  Yeah, I’m sure you have…

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to spell it out for me,” I said. “How you worked it all out?” Preferably in a way that doesn’t begin “once upon a time,” and end with “and they all lived happily ever after.”

  If I’d been hoping to appeal to his ego, I was destined to be disappointed. His face shut down. “I don’t got to explain nothing to you!”

  “That’s true. You don’t.” I picked up the Beretta from the sofa, prodded him in the gut with the muzzle. “Come on—up. Maybe I can find someone you will talk to.”

  “Who—Kincaid?” There was an incredulity in his voice, a note of disdain. Whatever he thought of his son-in-law, I realised, he did not fear him. Damn. I switched tactics.

  “No,” I said. “Helena.”

  If that threw him, he didn’t show it. “You think they’re gonna let you just walk me out of here, hey?”

  “No, but they’ll let you walk me out.”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  I dropped the magazine out of the Beretta, began thumbing the rounds out into the palm of my hand, fifteen in all. Orosco watched sourly as I dumped them into my pockets and racked the slide to spit out the single chambered round.

  “Because at the end of the day, we are both concerned with your daughter’s safety. And that safety is in my hands.”

  “You reckon, huh?” he demanded. “Not if I have any damn say in it.”

  “You think Kincaid will listen to you?” I asked. “You may not want to tell me why you didn’t warn him about the ambush he was walking into, but how are you going to be able to avoid telling him when you’re face to face?”

  “That’s none of your damn business!”

  I slotted the empty magazine into the pistol grip and handed the Beretta back to Orosco. He stared down at it in his hands, frowning, as if he wasn’t sure why I’d returned the weapon.

  I lifted one of the sofa cushions and grabbed the corkscrew I’d abandoned there. Palming it, I slipped my arm around his waist, inside his jacket. He stank of sweat overlaid with cologne. It made me wonder if he usually smelled that way, or if he’d come straight off his flight without a chance to shower. When he’d got his information about the attack on Ugoccione, and when he’d set off from the States, were questions I’d leave to Kincaid. Now, I tried not to cough as the man’s failing deodorant caught the back of my throat.

  “OK, Daddy, let’s go.”

  He didn’t move. I shifted my hand slightly, just enough for the tip of the corkscrew to tear a small hole in his shirt and dig into the flesh of his lower back. I felt him stiffen. I increased the pressure and twisted my wrist so the metal pierced the top layer of his skin. He flinched and tried to jerk away from me. I brought him up short.

  “If I keep going, I will screw this thing straight through your kidney,” I murmured. “Do you think, if I drive it in far enough, I’ll be able to pull out the whole kidney in one lump? Maybe I’ll hit your liver—bigger target than a kidney. Either way, puncturing it would be bad for you.”

  He didn’t speak, but his body was taut as a wire. The side of his face had taken on a waxy tint.

  “You’re crazy,” he managed then, almost a gasp. He tried to lean away from me, but all he could do was tuck his chin back. It was not a good look for him.

  “No. What I am is focused.” Focused on getting back to Helena. “Where’s your car?”

  “What makes you think I got a car?”

  Give me strength! “Are you trying to tell me you took a cab here?”

  “I was picked up.”

  “And these guys really don’t work for you?” I demanded. “Tell them you need a car. Insist on it. Why the hell do you think I gave you back your gun?”

  “Yeah, with no fucking bullets in it!”

  I spoke through clenched teeth. “Be. Persuasive.”

  I turned him, edged him towards the door. He moved slowly at first, but it’s amazing how easily someone can be controlled when you’ve planted the idea in their mind that you’ve skewered one of their vital organs and are about to yank it straight out of their body through the slit.

  He was the one who reached for the door handle, pulled the door open. We passed through into a large hallway. High ceilings, more shades of cream, gilt-framed mirrors. In one of them, I caught sight of our reflection. I was tucked in close to Orosco’s side, looking for all the world as if he was in charge and I was taking comfort and safety from him. I suppose in some ways I was—taking safety away from him, that is.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw a man appear at the opposite end of the hallway. I glanced at him long enough to see that he did not immediately brandish a weapon at the sight of us. And to note with some relief that it was not Khalid Hamzeh, or the clean-shaven man with the RPG. Even so, I felt Orosco stiffen, felt the hesitation in him as he weighed up his options. Did he continue to play along, or trust this man, whoever he was, to come to his aid.

  In the end, I think it was his pride that won out. He didn’t want the loss of face that would come with admitting a mere girl had overpowered and disarmed him. Besides, I didn’t know his relationship with these men. He’d denied they were working directly for him, so how had he persuaded them to grab Helena in the first place?

  There would be time, I hoped, to find that out later.

  “We’re leaving,” Orosco said gruffly. “I need a vehicle.” Sneaking a sideways look, I saw the man straighten, standing centred in the hallway. He did not look inclined to let us pass unchallenged.

  “The boss wants to speak with you first,” the man said. His voice was accented, but it was hard to tell much with one ear pressed into the lapel of Orosco’s suit.

  “Later. I want to get my daughter some place safe.” The lie tripped off his tongue without a hitch. Something to remember.

  The man cocked his head on one side, regarding us. “She is safe here.”

  Orosco bounced a little on his toes, his chin jutting forward like a dog ready to fight. “She’s safe where I say she’s safe,” he growled.

  They faced off like that for several long seconds. It did not escape my notice that the man’s jacket hung open, that his right hand twitched automatically towards the gun he undoubtedly carried beneath it. Orosco caught the move, too. He bristled. The Beretta was in his hand but, short of throwing it, there wasn’t much he could do to force the issue.

  I lifted my head a little, put a pleading expression on my face.

  “I guess we could stay, Daddy,” I said in a loud, whiny whisper. “But…my period just started. If maybe this guy would go out
and get me some tampons…?”

  Orosco’s shudder was more or less mirrored by the other man, who jerked his head. “Go,” he said, brusque. “I will tell him as soon as he returns. Do not be long.”

  Orosco hustled me past him. I kept my head down and appeared to be clinging on for dear life. Which, in a way, I was, holding the corkscrew embedded into the skin of his back. The wetness against my fingers could have been either sweat or blood.

  We’d taken no more than a step past him when the man said, “Wait!”

  My pulse rate accelerated wildly. If Orosco got any more tense he’d crack his spine. We turned as a single unit, like we were competitors in a three-legged race. The man was reaching into his jacket. I heard Orosco take an audible breath, start to react. I jammed the steel tip into his back a little harder, bringing him up short.

  I’d seen a lot of people reach for a lot of weapons in my time. Half my career in close protection had been spent assessing body language, trying to identify the one threatening move amongst a myriad of harmless gestures. Nothing about this man’s posture, the set of his shoulders, the tiny muscles of his face, told me he was about to go on the offensive. Orosco froze without completing whatever counter he’d been about to make.

  The man withdrew his hand from his inside pocket. In it was a set of car keys.

  “You will need these,” he said.

  38

  We stepped outside and I found myself in a narrow street with high stone buildings on either side. The street was flagged, barely wide enough for two cars to pass side by side. The buildings looked medieval. If we’d had more time I might have asked where we were. As it was, I had more pressing questions on my mind.

  “So, where’s this car?”